What Should My SEO Company Send Me Every Month? A Checklist You Can Hold Them To

Six months in, you are paying somewhere between $1,500 and $6,000 a month, the PDF that lands in your inbox is full of green arrows, and you still could not say out loud what anyone did last week. So you start asking what should my SEO company send me every month, which is the right question, asked about four months later than most owners ask it.

The uncomfortable truth is that the monthly report is where thin work hides. Impressions are up. Keyword positions improved. Domain authority ticked from 21 to 23. All of those can rise while nobody has touched your site. Meanwhile the things that are genuinely hard (pages written, links earned, technical issues closed, calls generated) are conveniently absent or buried on page nine.

This is the list of documents a real agency can produce without a week’s notice, the specific ways a thin report gets dressed up to look busy, and the four questions that settle it either way.

In this article

• What should my SEO company send me every month? Six items
• Metrics that look like progress and are not
• How to read the report you already have
• The four-question email
• When the problem is not the agency
• What to do if the answers are bad
• Frequently Asked Questions

What should my SEO company send me every month? Six items

1. Work completed, in plain English. Not “on-page optimization performed.” Which URLs, what changed, when. A list a non-marketer can read.
2. Work planned for next month. Specific enough that you could check it next time.
3. Organic traffic and conversions, from your Google Analytics property, compared to the prior month and the same month last year.
4. Impressions, clicks, and average position from Google Search Console: the only source that shows what Google actually served you for.
5. Rankings for keywords that produce revenue, not the easy ones. If the report tracks “affordable plumber reseda ca” and not “plumber near me,” you are being graded on a curve.
6. Assets created: pages published, links earned (with the live URLs), citations built, Google Business Profile posts.

You should also be able to get, on request and without friction: direct admin access to your own Analytics, Search Console, and Google Business Profile. If the agency owns those accounts and will not add you, that is not a reporting problem. That is them holding your own data hostage, and it is reason enough to leave.

Metrics that look like progress and are not

Metric in the report	What it suggests	Why it can be meaningless
Impressions up 40%	More people seeing you	Impressions rise from broad, irrelevant queries and from Google testing you briefly. No clicks, no value.
Domain Authority / Domain Rating up	Site getting stronger	Third-party scores from SEO tools, not Google metrics. They move with index updates nobody controls.
“Keywords in top 100”	Visibility growing	Position 94 and position 11 count the same. Nobody has ever clicked a position-94 result.
Total backlinks up	Authority building	Counts scraper sites, directories, and spam. Ask for the list, then look at it.
Bounce rate improved	Better engagement	Replaced in GA4 by engagement rate and easily shifted by tracking changes rather than site changes.
Overall site traffic up	Working	Branded searches and referral traffic are not SEO wins. Ask for non-branded organic only.

None of these are lies. They are simply the metrics that move without effort, which is exactly why they fill thin reports. The honest version of the same report shows non-branded organic sessions, conversions, and the money keywords, the ones that move slowly and only when someone works.

How to read the report you already have

Open last month’s report and do three things.

Find the verbs. Count the sentences describing a specific completed action with a date or a URL attached. If that count is under five for a full month of retainer, you are paying for monitoring, not work.

Check the comparison window. Month-over-month comparisons flatter whoever picks them. September against August looks great for most businesses and tells you nothing. Year-over-year is the honest cut.

Follow one claim to its source. Pick a single reported number, organic conversions, say, and verify it in your own Analytics. Numbers that do not reconcile are the single clearest signal in this entire article.

Then separate reporting from results. They are different problems with different fixes. A good agency can have a slow quarter; competitive terms take time, and we have written about realistic SEO timelines before. An agency that cannot tell you what it did last month has a different kind of problem.

The four-question email

Send this. It is short on purpose, and the response time matters as much as the content.

1. Can you send me a list of specific pages or items you worked on in the last 30 days, with URLs?
2. Can you add me as an admin on the Analytics, Search Console, and Google Business Profile accounts for my site?
3. Which five keywords are you actually targeting for revenue, and where do they rank today versus 90 days ago?
4. What is the plan for the next 60 days, and what would make you say it is not working?

A capable agency answers all four within two business days, because the answers already exist. Vagueness here is itself the answer. The fourth question is the real one: a partner who has never defined failure cannot tell you when you have arrived at it.

When the problem is not the agency

Sometimes the reporting is fine and the results are not, and the cause is on your side of the line.

• Rankings improved, calls did not. That is usually a conversion problem, not a traffic problem. Check what happens after the click and how fast anyone responds. We covered that in how fast you should call back a new lead.
• You hired SEO to fix a pricing or reputation problem. Traffic will not fix either.
• You have been with them four months. In competitive markets that is early. Judging a program at month four is like judging a hire at week three.
• You keep changing direction. Three pivots in six months means nobody has been allowed to finish anything.
• You never agreed what success is. If nobody wrote down a target at the start, every report is arguable forever.

The honest version of the question “is my agency working?” is “compared to what, measured how, by when?” If you cannot answer that, the next agency will be just as unaccountable as this one. Setting that up properly is worth doing before you hire anyone: tracking marketing performance is the groundwork.

What to do if the answers are bad

Do not fire anyone on a Friday afternoon. Do this in order.

First, put the four questions in writing and give a deadline. Second, pull your own baseline from Search Console and Analytics today, so you own a before-picture no matter who holds the contract next. Third, check the agreement for notice period and, critically, for who owns the website, the content, and the accounts. This is where a bad exit becomes an expensive one. Fourth, if you leave, require a written handover list: account transfers, content files, and any plugins or tools registered in their name.

And before replacing them, be honest about whether the scope was ever funded properly in the first place. What this work actually costs is laid out in how much SEO costs.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much should I be paying for SEO?

Ranges we see quoted in the Los Angeles market run roughly $1,000 to $2,500/month for local SEO on a single-location business, and $2,500 to $6,000/month for a fuller program with ongoing content. Below that, work is usually templated or offshored. Above it, you should expect a very specific scope document justifying the difference.

How often should I actually hear from them?

A written report monthly and a live conversation at least quarterly. Weekly reporting on SEO is theater: the data does not move meaningfully in seven days.

Is it normal for the agency to own my Google accounts?

It is common and it is bad. You should be the owner of your Google Business Profile, Analytics property, Search Console, and domain registration, with the agency added as a user. Fix this while the relationship is good, not during the exit.

How long before I should expect results?

For most local service businesses, early movement in local map results within three to six months and more durable organic gains over six to twelve. Anyone guaranteeing a ranking or a date is telling you something they cannot know.

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If you have been wondering what should my SEO company send me every month, the shortest test is the one above: ask for the four answers and watch how fast they arrive. If you want a second set of eyes on your last three reports, send them over or call (323) 485-6638. We will tell you plainly whether you are being underserved or being impatient. Both happen, and from the inside they look identical.

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Alex Maldonado, Founder of Maldonado Marketing, Los Angeles. This article is general information for business owners, not legal or financial advice.